| Recent technological advances in sensors, wireless networking, mobile and cloud computing promise to fundamentally change the way health care services are delivered and used. The development and proliferation of the wearable physiological monitors enable a shift in healthcare services from centralized hospitals and medical centers to individuals and their homes. Continuous wearable health monitoring has the potential to engage users, improve wellness management, prevent disease by early detection, and assist rehabilitation and treatments.;This dissertation presents a general framework and a practical implementation of computing infrastructure (both hardware and software aspects) to support mobile health and wellness monitoring applications as well as services to support further research in the area of wearable health monitoring. Specifically, we focus on a multi-tiered organization of the mHealth infrastructure that includes wearable sensor nodes at Tier 1, personal applications running on mobile computing platforms at Tier 2, and servers and services at Tier 3. We consider several important aspects of the mHealth systems including time-synchronization to support simultaneous distributed real-time monitoring and techniques for quantifying and improving energy-efficiency. These aspects are discussed on each tier of our infrastructure. Finally, the dissertation makes the case and introduces several original mHealth applications that are fully implemented and tested. These include monitoring and capturing dynamic heart response to posture transitions, quantification of timed-up-and-go tests, monitoring of physical activity of wheelchair users, and monitoring of occupational stress of nurses. |
